Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  Suddenly Tanya sprang up and said, ‘All right, I’d better go. But I want Sasha to take me home.’

  ‘Then don’t you think it would be polite to ask him?’ the professor said.

  Tanya lived with her mother and stepfather in a fancy neighborhood, on Smolenskaya Street between the Arbat and the river, just round the corner from the Foreign Ministry. They took the metro. Sasha was coatless, and Tanya carried her sheepskin coat — it looked American — over her arm. There was a breath of spring in the air, the false spring that sometimes comes to Moscow in February or March, cheating the land so that the buds begin to sprout and the orchards come alive, only to be killed off when the frosts return. Later in the year, after that liar’s spring, you would have to range far to find blueberries in the woods.

  ‘When did your parents get divorced?’ Sasha asked her when they got off the subway at the Smolenskaya station.

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’ She gave him an alert, sideways look. ‘Well, it’s no disgrace now that Great Stalin is buried. My father was in the camps. For anti-Soviet agitation. Something he is supposed to have said in one of his lectures. They tried to make out that he was plotting to put a bomb in the University, if you can believe it. They sent him to the camps for seven years. It nearly killed him. After Stalin, he was rehabilitated — one of the first politicals the bitches let out. He even got his job back at the University. But they broke something inside him.’

  They were on the street. She looked cautiously up and down the row of imposing apartment houses.

  ‘He’s a Leninist, you know,’ she said. ‘He’s a believer.’

  ‘I know. We’ve been talking quite a lot.’

  ‘That’s our block over there,’ she said, pointing. ‘You see, she knows how to look out for herself. When they dragged my father away, they explained to her that an honest citizen has only to ask to get a divorce from someone convicted of anti-Soviet crimes. She got unhitched right away. The next thing, she’s in bed with our literary lion Erinshteyn, who makes a fat living by writing whatever they tell him. He used to eat out of Beria’s hand. Now he’s finishing an article that says that Beria was a British spy.’

  When they reached the door of her building, she said gravely, ‘Do you have many friends?’

  ‘Well, not real friends,’ he admitted. He had never had a conversation like this with anyone at school.

  ‘Let’s be friends,’ she proposed. And without waiting for an answer, she kissed him quickly on the cheek and skipped away into her building. Her lips were swollen, with a faintly violet hue; they looked bruised. There was a memory of sandalwood in the smell of her face and her hair, and nothing of the schoolgirl at all.

  *

  They grew up quickly, after that liar’s spring. They often met in the professor’s apartment. But they would also make excuses to rendezvous in different corners of the city, at galleries and museums, or the zoo, or by the big dipper in Gorky Park. Sometimes, when Tanya’s mother and stepfather were out — they attended lots of official functions — they could meet at the apartment on Smolenskaya Street. Tanya, who always seemed to have money and who knew the most surprising people, would play ‘rock on the ribs’ on the phonograph. You could buy these records of American jazz and rock and roll from black market peddlers. They were made from tapes of Voice of America and BBC broadcasts and engraved on old X-ray plates. If you held one of them up to the light, you could see an unknown patient’s rib cage. In those days, you could hear Western music wafting out of open windows all over Moscow.

  On the living-room sofa in the flat on Smolenskaya Street, in their last summer of school, they became lovers, with musical accompaniment by Dizzie Gillespie. Sasha was nervous. She seemed assured and sophisticated. He was pleased when he discovered it was her first time too. He was awkward, and he heard her suck in her breath in pain, and it was over too fast. But starting over, he began to learn her rhythms and his own, and linger over every part of her long, supple body.

  Levin sensed what had happened. Sasha could tell from the way he stared at Tanya the next time they visited him. He said nothing to them, but Sasha went to see him alone and announced that he intended to marry Tanya as soon as they were old enough.

  ‘Don’t come to me with that slop,’ Levin admonished him. ‘When you’ve graduated fr9m the university and decided on your future, then we’ll see. But listen, Sasha’ — and now there was a sort of burr in his voice — ‘I want you to look out for her. She’s not as steady as you. Haven’t you noticed how she talks? She comes right out and says what she thinks. She uses words as if there were no taboos. That’s very dangerous.’

  ‘But things are changing,’ Sasha objected. It wasn’t just a matter of rock on the ribs and boys wearing narrow, tapered pants, he thought. People were speaking up. Especially the poets. Their works circulated in little magazines, typed on ricepaper in editions of ten, twenty, or fifty copies. They called it samizdat, ‘self-publishing,’ a spoof on the name of the state publishing house, Gosizdat. They gathered in the evening around the newly erected statue of Mayakovsky on the square that bore his name, to read their own verses and those of Mandelstam, Gumilev, Pasternak, and Alexander Galich. And the authorities let it go. You had to say that for Nikita. He looked like a buffoon, tripped up over his own words, but he had a soft spot for writers. He had even let this Solzhenitsyn publish his novel about life in the camps. It was the talk of Moscow.

  ‘We’ll see how much has changed,’ Levin said skeptically. ‘Now, keep Tanya away from Mayakovsky Square.’

  But Tanya wasn’t easily ruled. They both entered Moscow University, and attended classes in the old yellow building at 20, Prospekt Marx, that the male students dubbed the Faculty of Brides because it was reputed to attract some of the prettiest girls in Moscow. The location was convenient for both of them. They continued to live with their families, instead of moving into the dormitories around the wedding-cake tower up on Lenin Hills. Tanya registered with the Faculty of Philology; Sasha, with the History Faculty — the professor’s influence had told.

  Tanya threw herself into everything. They went to the poetry readings in Mayakovsky Square, despite the professor’s prohibition, and heard a pale young student called Zhukovsky reading from a ballad that became a sort of password:

  Do not fear ashes, do not fear curses,

  Do not fear brimstone and fire,

  But fear like the plague the man with the rage

  To tell you, ‘I know what’s required!’

  Who tells you, ‘Fall in and follow me

  If heaven on earth’s your desire.’

  They heard Zhukovsky read some of his own verses, full of high, windy words about how poetry was more powerful than the gun. Tanya seemed fascinated by him then, and later, when a group of them squeezed into a small apartment to drink coffee and talk excitedly about how they were going to change the country. Sasha grew impatient with all this talk, and especially with Zhukovsky, who wagged his finger insistently as he lectured everybody in his high-pitched voice.

  There was usually a crowd of hooligans in the square, jeering and threatening. One night, Sasha recognized a Komsomol leader from his own Faculty among them. They went growling and snapping around the tight little knot of spectators, trying to scare people into leaving. When the reading was done and the audience started thinning out, the hecklers made a grab for the poetry readers. Zhukovsky was thrown to the ground and Sasha saw the hooligans starting in with their boots. The policemen in the square turned the other way.

  The beating seemed to increase Zhukovsky’s fervor. He was unforgiving toward those who weren’t prepared to take part in dissident activities. ‘I’ve heard them all, all the cosy little excuses,’ he started declaiming one night, when Tanya had dragged Sasha along to yet another meeting. ‘You can’t get blood from a stone, isn’t that right?’ Zhukovsky asked rhetorically. ‘Anyway, we Russians love to be ordered around. We have no aptitude for democracy. What’s that you say? Oh, yes, protest will o
nly strengthen the hard-liners. It will bring the Stalinists down on our heads. Anyway, it’s not the right time. Your exams are coming up, or your mother’s sick, or you managed to get your girlfriend in the family way. Yes, I’ve heard them all. But you, Preobrazhensky, you’re a subtle one. You just hang around watching us, never arguing, never taking part.’

  ‘You can’t break an ax with a whip,’ Sasha said quietly, quoting the Russian proverb. ‘The way you’re going on, you’ll only get a lot of people arrested.’

  Zhukovsky flew at him then, and they got into a real slanging-match. Sasha was angry and embarrassed to see Tanya taking Zhukovsky’s side. He went home before she did, and learned the meaning of jealousy for the first time. But then the summer came on, and they forgot their disagreements. They bought sleeper tickets on the night train to Leningrad, and made love in tempo with the gentle rocking of the carriage. They borrowed a car, and traveled the ‘golden circle’ around Moscow to the storied cities of Vladimir and Novgorod.

  *

  They were nearing the end of their third year at the University when Professor Levin buttonholed Sasha in the lobby of the building on Prospekt Marx. Above him, on the landing of the stairway, the red cloth under the bust of Lenin had been dragged to one side, and you could see that the plinth below was only plywood.

  ‘I want you to come and see me tonight,’ the professor said. He seemed to be having trouble breathing.

  Sasha began to make excuses. He had arranged to meet Tanya at the cinema.

  ‘Tell her your mother’s sick,’ Levin said. ‘Whatever you like. But I have to talk to you tonight, and it’s best that she knows nothing about it.’

  Sasha looked into the professor’s eyes and stopped arguing. They were open wounds.

  *

  Sasha arrived at Levin’s apartment at 7:00. The professor locked the door and poured both of them vodka. It was a bad sign, because Sasha had never seen Levin drink.

  ‘You’re no fool,’ the professor said to him. ‘You can see what’s going on. We have been through a time when a lot of young people’s hopes were raised. Solzhenitsyn could publish in Moscow. But tell me, where is Solzhenitsyn now? Where is the editor who printed his work in Novy Mir? Where is our friend Khrushchev, who was supposed to be responsible for all this liberalism?

  ‘You know as well as I do. The old gang got worried. They thought their feeding trough might be taken away. They said, enough is enough, and booted Nikita out. Now, go anywhere you like and tell me where you can find a book about Stalin’s crimes on sale. Listen to the speeches of our leaders and you’ll see little phrases creeping back in about our debt to Great Stalin in the war. There’s even a move afoot to rehabilitate him at the next Party Congress.’

  ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Of course it’s possible,’ Levin snapped back. ‘But just try to explain any of this to Tanya. She thinks she’s leading a charmed life.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  Then he said, ‘You know I was in the camps.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tanya told you.’

  Sasha’s silence passed for confirmation.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you never asked me about it. But there is something you have to know.’ He started shaking, so violently that Sasha rose to help him . Levin waved at him to stay in his seat. ‘I saw someone today,’ he began again, then checked himself. ‘No, we must start in the proper place.’

  *

  ‘Do you know what it is to hate the smell of the pine forest, to hate the smell of woodsmoke even more? I was sent to a logging camp in the Perm region, near a hole called Kuchino. There were a lot of us politicals there in those days. In the winter, the temperature falls to forty-five degrees below. But winter or summer, the workday didn’t finish until we had fulfilled our quota. They sent us out into the woods when the snow was chest deep. We had to tread it down, cut down the trees, grope for the branches through the snow and lop them off, and then haul the trunks on our backs to the railroad cars. At night they fed us on slops and locked us up in our barracks, to suffocate in the smoke of wet firewood. Men became so desperate they would do anything to get taken away to the clinic — break a limb, chop off their own fingers, sniff sugar because they thought that would give them tuberculosis. Every time I smell the forest it all comes back.

  ‘The criminals hated us, and the guards egged them on. The trusties — the vipers, we called them — were all picked from this class. A brute called Goga lorded it over our barracks. He bribed the guards to bring him meat, tobacco, even vodka. He used some of the younger ones as his camp wives. Goga really had it in for me. “I’m a thief, a real man!” That was his theme song. The first time he beat me up, he said it was because that is what kikes deserved. We were enemies of Russia, the whole lot of us. The guards liked to watch.

  ‘For each of us, the politicals, there was some last thing, something private, that you had to cling to, without which you were finished. There was one man who was forever making chess sets out of crumbs of bread, molded with his own spit. I tried to recite poetry in my head, and when I ran out of lines, I tried to make up my own. It didn’t come easily. Each word was as heavy as a log. Our veteran, Lieutenant Ivanov, would get hold of a scrap of pencil lead and start designing guns — always the same gun, in fact, a self-propelled monster with all sorts of fantastic embellishments. Ivanov, the gunner, was the strongest of us, the only one that even Goga seemed to respect.

  Ivanov kept to himself pretty much, but one day he came to me and said that he had heard that I was helping one of the other zeks to learn English, and that he would like to learn too. After that, we got to talking a bit. He told me he had served with an armored unit in the advance on Berlin. He had been put away under Article 58, like most of us. They told him that his real crime was bourgeois humanism. By his excessive concern for the treatment of enemy civilians, he had defamed the Soviet army.

  ‘One morning, we were roused a couple of hours before dawn, as usual, and ordered to set about cleaning up the barracks. Every clean-up was an excuse for the guards to go ferreting about among the prisoners’ private treasures, stealing money and clothes. Our godfather, the NKVD captain, would come sniffing around for hidden books and papers. He would confiscate Ivanov’s pencil leads when he found them, but the lieutenant would hide his reserve supply in his mouth, between gum and cheek.

  ‘That morning, we were ordered to smarten ourselves up for an inspection. What a joke! We were shivering scarecrows, in filthy coats patched together from any old rags. Our boots were made with strips torn from worn-out padded jackets and stitched to a bit of rubber. Our families sent clothes, of course. But anything worth having in the packages from home was stolen by the guards or Goga’s gang.

  ‘Anyway, we were lined up like conscripts on a parade ground, for the amusement of a bunch of higher-ups — well-fed men from Moscow with round pink faces, warm overcoats, and fur hats. These dignitaries didn’t want to waste too much time on us. They were obviously impatient to inspect the contents of the commandant’s bar. They nodded at everything.

  ‘Then one of the dignitaries, thicker and more stupid-looking than the rest, clasped his hands behind his back, stuck out his chin, and called out, “Any complaints?”

  ‘We knew better than that. The only sound was from one of the thieves, who let out a fart.

  ‘The dignitaries all started nodding again, as if something significant had been accomplished, and moved on in the direction of their refreshments.

  ‘All except one. I had spotted him earlier, because he seemed to be taking a closer interest in us than his colleagues, and because our NKVD Oper was hovering around him like a waiter hoping for a big tip. This one was a chekist — a secret policeman — too, strutting around with a pistol on his hip, turning his squinty gaze on each face as if he wanted to fix it in his memory.

  ‘I admit I was scared when he stopped in front of me. I wondered if someone had ratted on a political argument I had had with one of th
e other prisoners. I had only gone down to the box once. You sit on a narrow ledge, high up on the wall, looking at nothing, losing count of the hours and the days, till you feel the ledge sawing into your bones. When I was taken there, I found saliva on the walls, saliva streaked with blood. God knows what became of the man before me. The emptiness consumes you, till you start babbling to yourself, until you invite in ghosts. But I don’t need to tell you what it was like. I didn’t want to go down to the box again.

  ‘So I was trembling in front of the chekist, looking down at his high boots lined with fur, the kind of boots men would kill for twenty times over in the camps. I felt a wonderful sense of relief when I saw him swivel away from me toward my neighbor, the gunner. I even said to myself, Let it be him. That doesn’t shock you, does it? Brotherhood doesn’t survive fear — or hunger. Our camp authorities understand that very well.

  ‘The chekist put his thumbs in his belt and said, “Ivanov?” in a tentative sort of way.

  ‘Ivanov stiffened and mumbled the rest. “Pavel Mikhailovich, Comrade Major.”

  ‘I hadn’t noticed the chekist’s rank; it was natural that Ivanov, an army lieutenant, should have done so. But it was also plain that there was something between these two men.

  ‘The chekist ran a gloved finger along the side of his nose, a pulpy sort of nose with large pores. I watched his breath condense in a vapor trail as he opened his mouth to speak. But he thought better of whatever he had intended to say and marched off, with the camp Oper trotting eagerly at his heels.

  ‘I saw them pause on the far side of the compound. They looked back at us — or rather, at Ivanov. Our camp godfather was nodding vigorous agreement in response to whatever the NKVD major was saying.

  ‘After that, it was a normal day. We hauled logs until after dark, and sat down to a gruel made of black cabbage, rotten potatoes, and other trash. There were more cockroaches than usual floating in it, but all the same, I was concerned when I saw that Ivanov wasn’t eating his share. You had to eat everything you could lay hands on to stay alive. We even scraped lichen off the rocks, when we could find it.